Logging and Monitoring for Security

Logging and monitoring are essential practices in DevSecOps that help you keep your systems secure and resilient. By capturing detailed records of system activities and continuously observing your environment, you can:

• Detect suspicious or unauthorized activity early;
• Audit actions and changes for compliance and accountability;
• Respond quickly and effectively to security incidents.

When you set up proper logging, you create a trail of evidence that shows what happened, when, and by whom. Monitoring helps you spot unusual events as they occur, so you can act before they become bigger problems. Together, these practices form the foundation for building secure, trustworthy systems in any DevOps workflow.

Scenario: Detecting Unauthorized Access with Logging and Monitoring

Imagine you manage a DevOps environment for an e-commerce website. To protect your application, you set up logging and monitoring tools to track all user activities and system events.

Step 1: Collecting Logs

• Application servers generate logs for every login attempt;
• Web servers record details about each request, including IP address and requested URLs;
• Security tools log alerts about suspicious activities, such as failed logins or unusual data access;
• All logs are sent to a centralized log management system for storage and analysis.

Step 2: Analyzing Logs

• The log management system scans for patterns, such as repeated failed login attempts from the same IP address;
• Automated rules flag any user trying to access sensitive admin pages without proper authorization;
• The system creates alerts for any activities that match known attack signatures, like SQL injection attempts.

Step 3: Responding to Threats

• When the monitoring tool detects 20 failed login attempts from the same IP in 5 minutes, it triggers an alert;
• You receive an email and a dashboard notification about the suspicious activity;
• Security policies automatically block the IP address for 30 minutes to prevent further attempts;
• You review the logs to confirm the attack and update firewall rules if needed.

By collecting, analyzing, and responding to logs in real time, you quickly identify and stop unauthorized access attempts before they can cause harm.